An astonishingly inventive and terrifying debut novel about the emergence of an ancient species, dormant for over a thousand years, and now on the march.

Deep in the jungle of Peru, where so much remains unknown, a black, skittering mass devours an American tourist whole. Thousands of miles away, an FBI agent investigates a fatal plane crash in Minneapolis and makes a gruesome discovery. Unusual seismic patterns register in a Kanpur, India earthquake lab, confounding the scientists there. During the same week, the Chinese government “accidentally” drops a nuclear bomb in an isolated region of its own country. As these incidents begin to sweep the globe, a mysterious package from South America arrives at a Washington, D.C. laboratory. Something wants out.

The world is on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster. An ancient species, long dormant, is now very much awake.

When I started reading this book, I had high hopes. While on an expedition in Manu National Park, Peru one of the characters is sick, one of the characters wants to see safari type animals but that is not going to happen in this place because it is Peru and while it is the jungle, there are no animals. On top of that, all of them are about to experience something sinister. The rest of the world is now experiencing unexplained incidents, and this is when the story falls flat for me.

The author jumps back and forth from location to location, Minneapolis, India, D.C. etc and while I don’t mind books that do that, the story is disjointed and not fun. It’s bogged down in details that have some bearing on the story but lots of details we don’t need. For example, in the opening the character on the expedition had diarrhea and in my view he spent way too much time on it. When a character is called on to help with a situation and is a respected scientist, she ignores the call. That wasn’t realistic in my view. It was a crisis by then. Too much time was spent on back story and information we didn’t need to move the story forward. One example of this are the women in the book who are obsessed with sex even at critical times. The President of the United States a woman and more interested in getting laid than worrying about a nuclear crisis. Really..? By the end, I just wanted it to be over. And at the conclusion of the book, for the situation to be catastrophic , we are left hanging. The author left the reader with a lot of unanswered questions. I suppose it’s a set-up for the next book and had this book grabbed me, I would probably be looking forward to the next one.

The book wasn’t terrible but I was looking forward to a page turner and what it was for me was just a book.